The Killer's Shadow: The FBI's Hunt for a White Supremacist Serial Killer

By John Douglas and Mark Olshaker

The legendary FBI criminal profiler and international bestselling author of Mindhunter and The Killer Across the Table returns with this timely, relevant book that goes to the heart of extremism and domestic terrorism, examining in-depth his chilling pursuit of, and eventual prison confrontation with Joseph Paul Franklin, a White Nationalist serial killer and one of the most disturbing psychopaths he has ever encountered.

Worshippers stream out of an Midwestern synagogue after sabbath services, unaware that only a hundred yards away, an expert marksman and  avowed racist, antisemite and member of the Ku Klux Klan, patiently awaits, his hunting rifle at the ready. 

 The October 8, 1977 shooting was a forerunner to the tragedies and divisiveness that plague us today. John Douglas, the FBI’s pioneering, first full-time criminal profiler, hunted the shooter—a white supremacist named Joseph Paul Franklin, whose Nazi-inspired beliefs propelled a three-year reign of terror across the United States, targeting African Americans, Jews, and interracial couples. In addition, Franklin bombed the home of Jewish leader Morris Amitay, shot and paralyzed Hustler magazine publisher Larry Flynt, and seriously wounded civil rights leader Vernon Jordan. The fugitive supported his murderous spree robbing banks in five states, from Georgia to Ohio.

 Douglas and his writing partner Mark Olshaker return to this disturbing case that reached the highest levels of the Bureau, which was fearful Franklin would become a presidential assassin—and haunted him for years to come as the threat of copycat domestic terrorist killers increasingly became a reality. Detailing the dogged pursuit of Franklin that employed profiling, psychology and meticulous detective work, Douglas and Olshaker relate how the case was a make-or-break test for the still-experimental behavioral science unit and revealed a new type of, determined, mission-driven serial killer whose only motivation was hate.

A riveting, cautionary tale rooted in history that continues to echo today, The Killer's Shadow is a terrifying and essential exploration of the criminal personality  in the vile grip of extremism and what happens when rage-filled speech evolves into deadly action and hatred of the “other" is allowed full reign.

 The Killer's Shadow includes an 8-page color photo insert.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Release date: Nov 17, 2020
• ISBN: 9780062979773

John Douglas

John Douglas, the legendary FBI criminal profiler and veteran author of true crime books, has spent over twenty-five years researching and culling the stories of America’s most disturbing criminals. A veteran of the United States Air Force, he has directly worked and/or had overall supervision in over 5,000 violent crime cases over the past 48 years. He is currently chairman of the board of the “Cold Case Foundation.” One of the foremost experts and investigators of criminal minds and motivations, he currently lives in the Washington, D.C. area. Mark Olshaker is an Emmy Award-winning documentary filmmaker and author of ten nonfiction books and five novels, including Einstein’s Brain and The Edge. His books with former FBI Special Agent and criminal profiling pioneer John Douglas, beginning with Mindhunter and, most recently, Law & Disorder, have sold millions of copies and have been translated into many languages. Mindhunter is now a dramatic series on Netflix, directed by David Fincher. He and his wife Carolyn, an attorney, live in Washington, D.C.

Book preview

Prologue

The sniper had been meticulous. He’d examined potential targets around the city and then surveilled the landscape around the one he’d finally selected for the optimal position the day before.

The Brith Sholom Kneseth Israel Congregation was located on Linden Avenue in the Richmond Heights suburb of St. Louis. It was close to Interstates 64 and 170, so the getaway would be quick and efficient. Across the street there was a knoll with bushes, high grass, and a telephone pole, which would provide good cover and a clean angle on the synagogue parking lot. It was about a hundred yards away—no problem for his bolt-action, center-fire Remington 700 .30-06 semiautomatic hunting rifle, fitted with a telescopic sight. He had brought it to his chosen position ahead of time, hidden in a black guitar case under the bushes. He’d already taken the precaution of filing down the weapon’s serial number so it couldn’t be traced—he tried to never use the same weapon twice, just part of his routine planning. He arrived by bicycle so no vehicle could be identified, no tire tracks traced to a particular type of car. He left his own vehicle at a shopping center parking lot, some distance away.

It was October 8, 1977, a mild, sunny Saturday, with autumn just starting to make its arrival felt.

He had hammered two ten-inch nails into the telephone pole when he visited the site on Friday and stretched a sock between them to serve as a gun rest.

Then he waited.

He had looked up the service time and knew that it let out around one o’clock, in time for people to have lunch.

It was just a few minutes after that when the doors opened and the congregants started pouring out. Two men stopped to talk to each other in the parking lot on the north side of the building. There was a young girl standing next to one of them, and a woman and two other girls nearby—wife and children, probably. The first man started getting into his car.

The sniper tensed his grip on the rifle, focused on his heart rate, and controlled his breathing into a conscious, consistent cadence. He peered into the sight and smoothly squeezed off two quick shots in the direction of the two men. There was a loud report that must have sounded like firecrackers exploding to everyone coming out of the synagogue, but he felt, more than heard, it as the concussive wave of the firing lifted the barrel and pushed his shoulder back. A split second later he saw one of the men—the one with the girl by his side—clutch his chest and go down. The other man seemed to flinch, but the sniper couldn’t tell whether he’d gotten him or not. People nearby instinctively crouched down or dove to the ground. The second guy quickly snatched up the other man’s little girl, who was yelling in terror, and dashed for cover between the parked cars. All hell broke loose as the woman with the two girls rushed to the fallen man and bent over him on the pavement. When she stood up, she was screaming and there was blood all over the front of her dress.

After the shooting started, according to multiple later reports, several children ran back into the synagogue building, where the majority of congregants remained, shouting, They’re shooting people! They’re killing people!

Taking advantage of the pandemonium, the sniper repositioned the rifle on his shoulder, refocused his aim, and fired off three more shots in the general direction of the synagogue building. The bang only increased the panic. He might have hit one more man; he wasn’t sure. But now it was time to get the hell out of there.

He quickly but carefully wiped down the rifle and guitar case of any possible fingerprints, placed the rifle inside the case, and threw it into the bushes. Then he climbed onto the bicycle and sped off to the nearby shopping center parking lot, unlocked and climbed into his car, turned the key in the ignition, gunned the accelerator, and took off.

THE MAN HIT WAS NAMED GERALD GERRY GORDON, FORTY-TWO YEARS OF age, who, with his wife, Sheila, and three daughters, was among the two hundred or so guests attending the bar mitzvah of Ricky Kalina, son of Maxine and Merwyn Kalina, two of Gerry’s closest friends. He had just been congratulating and saying goodbye to Ricky right outside the synagogue doors before heading to his car with Sheila and the girls. Gerry had a reputation as something of a jokester, so when he went down clutching his chest after the loud pops, people around him thought he was playacting. Even Steven Goldman, the friend he was talking to in the parking lot, thought Gerry was joking, until he glanced down and saw the blood spreading across Gerry’s chest. That was when he snatched up Gerry’s little girl to protect her from whatever was happening.

Ricky ran back into the building to find his parents and get to a phone to call for help. The ambulance arrived within minutes and took Gerry to St. Louis County Hospital, where he was rushed into surgery. The single bullet had pierced his left arm and lodged in his chest. He died on the operating table at around three from blood loss and damage to his lung, stomach, and other organs. He was a salesman for the Ropak Corporation, a paper-products distributing firm. His three daughters were named Hope, Michele, and Traci.

The police also arrived quickly to the scene and immediately cordoned off the area and began interviewing witnesses and looking for physical evidence.

Just as Gordon went down, Steve Goldman thought he felt something like a bug bite on his left shoulder but forgot all about it in the chaos after his friend had been shot. Minutes later, when he was giving his shattering account to a police officer, the officer spotted a bullet hole in Goldman’s suit jacket. That was how close, Steve suddenly realized, he had come to sharing Gerry Gordon’s fate.

Another man, thirty-year-old William Lee Ash, was struck by one of the final three shots, and he knew he had been hit. He was also treated at County. He lost the little finger on his left hand when the shot first hit the hand and then embedded in his hip. His wife, Susan, was Maxine Kalina’s cousin.

The police agreed that five shots were fired in total, in what investigators stated was a highly premeditated attack. They found the Remington rifle inside the black guitar case not far from the telephone pole into which the two nails had been hammered. The sock was still attached and damp from the previous evening’s rain, indicating the shooter had been there before. An empty five-round clip was found in the rifle, and five spent shells were recovered nearby. No fingerprints were detected.

A St. Louis County police helicopter pilot spotted a man running across a highway overpass near Brith Sholom and believed he might have been the sniper. Police recovered one bullet in the radiator of a car parked in the synagogue lot and another lodged in the wall of a home across Linden Avenue from the house of worship. Police speculated that a bicycle found about a block away could have been used by the assailant.

Witnesses noted that a man carrying a black guitar case had been in the vicinity about an hour before the shooting. They described him as about five feet, ten inches tall, of medium build, with long curly hair, a fair complexion, and acne scars. He was estimated to be between nineteen and twenty-five years of age. Other witnesses saw a man running through a shopping center parking lot near the synagogue after the shooting, looking over his shoulder as if afraid he was being pursued.

The attack was a huge story throughout the region. Though area Jewish leaders were quoted in Monday’s edition of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch as discounting anti-Semitism as a motive in the shooting, most synagogues added guards and security patrols. The whole city seemed to go into a panic after the sniper incident, a police dispatcher was quoted as saying in the same article.

St. Louis police lieutenant Thomas H. Boulch of the Major Case Squad was assigned to lead the investigation, heading up a team of more than twenty detectives, working with officers from the Richmond Heights PD. Boulch was quoted in the newspaper as saying they were keeping an open mind as to motive. We don’t want to close any avenue. We’re following up on kooks, radical groups, anti-Semitic groups, anyone. The squad looked into the possibility that the sniper was after a specific individual.

Brith Sholom rabbi Benson Skeff could think of no reason why his synagogue would be targeted. Norman A. Stack, executive director of the St. Louis Jewish Community Relations Council, agreed, telling the Post-Dispatch, Nothing has really happened recently to indicate any problems within the Jewish community of St. Louis. It could have happened to anyone anywhere.

That same week, the St. Louis County Police Department’s Identification Bureau successfully employed a chemical treatment to raise the murder weapon’s serial number. With assistance from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms in Washington, D.C., the rifle was traced to a previous owner in Irving, Texas. He said he had sold it about four weeks previously for two hundred dollars and provided a description of the purchaser to a police sketch artist. Witnesses said that sketch looked like the man they had seen running through the nearby shopping center parking lot, though investigators were unwilling to dismiss the possibility that two individuals were involved in the sniper attack.

Whoever it was, though—one person or more—had managed to disappear.

Part 1

On the Hunt for a Killer

Chapter 1

October 10, 1980

I was in my office at Quantico when I got the call. Back then, the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit (BSU) was located in a large and dingy basement space under the library, with our individual offices defined by six-foot-high partitions; whenever any of us was on the phone, everyone else in the office would hear the conversation, whether they wanted to or not. There were usually eight of us working down there together, instructors in criminal psychology, sociology, police stress, and other related subjects. At that point, I was the only full-time operational profiler, though I still put in some time on the Criminal Psych classes (officially known as Criminal Psychology), which we were trying to make more directly useful for law enforcement.

I’d come up with the idea of interviewing incarcerated repeat killers and violent predators when my instructor partner Special Agent Robert Bob Ressler and I had been out teaching road schools with local police departments and law enforcement agencies a few years earlier. These schools were kind of a highlights version of the curriculum we taught at Quantico to new agents and senior officers, and detectives chosen to be FBI Academy fellows.

The initial aim of these prison interviews had been to learn and understand what the offenders said was going on in their minds before, during, and after the crime—along with the behavior they displayed while they were committing the crime—so we could correlate it with the evidence they’d left at the crime scenes and body dump sites. And although the interviews of men like Santa Cruz, California, Coed Killer Edmund Kemper, New York City’s Son of Sam David Berkowitz, Oregon shoe fetish killer Jerome Brudos, and Los Angeles Helter Skelter murder master Charles Manson became the foundation for the FBI’s behavioral profiling program, the original motivation was just to be better instructors and not look foolish in front of those seasoned detectives and chiefs in the FBI’s National Academy program, who often had more experience and direct knowledge of the crimes than we did.

Applying the knowledge gained from our interviews, we were trying to transform Criminal Psych into an actual investigative tool. It was becoming a popular course, and police and sheriff’s officers began bringing cases from their hometowns for us to review. In 1979, we received just under sixty cases, and I started tapering off from full-time teaching. The following year, the caseload more than doubled, which is why, in January 1980, I gave up my full-time teaching assignment and became program manager of the criminal profiling program and a guest lecturer at the academy.

The call that morning was from someone I knew well: Dave Kohl, a unit chief working under Joseph P. Schulte Jr., chief of the Civil Rights Division up at FBI headquarters in Washington, D.C. I had known Dave since my days as a street agent in Milwaukee, when I had been on the field office SWAT team and he was the team leader and supervisor of the reactive squad—the squad that handled kidnapping, extortion, and related crimes. A former marine officer and a champion wrestler in college, Dave had been my rabbi in the Bureau, an expression we used to describe an older or more senior official who took you under his wing, became your mentor, and generally looked out for you. But it was quickly clear that this was not a personal call.

John, have you heard of Joseph Paul Franklin?

Umm, yeah, I said, quickly trying to associate the name with a case. Isn’t he the guy they think shot those two Black joggers in Salt Lake City?

That’s the one. And he could also be good for murders of Blacks in Ohio, Indiana, Pennsylvania, maybe some other places.

Didn’t they arrest him and he escaped from a police station or something?

Right. In Florence, Kentucky; it’s not far from Cincinnati. He just climbed out the window during a break in the interrogation. That’s why I’m calling. You’ll probably be getting a formal request from headquarters, but I’m asking you now. Do you think you could do some kind of psychological assessment that could help us find him?

Well, I said, "I think from research and experience I have a handle on how the criminal mind works, although this is pretty unusual. Normally, we deal with unknown subjects and try to describe the UNSUB’s characteristics from crime scene evidence, police reports, and victimology. Here, you know who the guy is, just not where you can find him or what he’ll do next. The elements of an assessment are still the same, though. No guarantees, but I’ll give it my best shot. Are you going to be sending materials down here?"

There’s so much, you’d better come up here and pick and choose what you want. How long do you think this will take?

How about a couple of days? I suggested.

Can we have it in the next twenty-four hours? Dave countered.

A beat of silence, then, Okay, I said. I’ll be up this afternoon.

I’ll see you then. And John, there’s something else you need to know. This may have been the guy who shot Vernon Jordan, and we know he wrote a threatening letter to President Carter when he was a candidate because of Carter’s pro–civil-rights positions. With the president traveling around the country campaigning for reelection, Secret Service is taking him very seriously.

Jordan, the civil rights leader, had been shot and nearly killed in Fort Wayne, Indiana, the previous May, and it had brought all the trauma of the 1950s and ’60s civil rights movement back to the national stage.

In the Bureau ethos, when you get a call from headquarters, you drop whatever you’re doing and get right on it. Technically, the academy is part of Headquarters Division, but in the BSU back then, a request from on high was itself an unusual situation. Normally, they pretty much ignored us, which was fine with me as we tried to develop our program. Until that point, our work typically came from local law enforcement agencies that would request our consultation and send us all relevant case materials: crime scene photos, detective and witness reports, autopsy protocols, lab analysis of physical evidence, that type of thing. From that we would come up with a profile of the type of offender they should be looking for to help focus their investigation. Depending on the circumstances and type of case, we might also come up with proactive strategies to help flush him (and it was almost always a him) out or get him to make a move.

This was different. Not only did we have a name at the outset, but the higher-ups at the FBI were the ones requesting our involvement. Unlike all of the requests that had come from local agencies, this was the first case to come from Bureau headquarters itself, important enough that they were willing to take a chance on our still-experimental approach. It was the kind of request that could put us on the map if we were successful. And it was a personal challenge to me to see if we could reverse engineer our analytical process to get our man; and then, if we did, whether we had the goods to properly charge him and bring him to justice.

I CALLED OVER TO THE ACADEMY MOTOR POOL AND ASKED IF THEY HAD A CAR I could have for the afternoon; otherwise I’d have to drive my own car and submit for mileage reimbursement. With all my traveling, I had to fill out enough expense reports as it was, so I’d just as soon not have to do another. The pool did have one available to me, so I hiked over to the garage and signed out one of the standard Bureau Ford sedans. I drove down the winding road that takes you through the marine base that was our landlord, and out onto 95 North. In those days, back in the eighties, it wasn’t yet the extended parking lot it’s since become at most times of the day, and you could get from Quantico to downtown Washington in less than an hour.

As I drove, I thought of the assignment ahead. This Franklin case, if he turned out to be good for all or most of the crimes he was suspected of, would be on a different order of magnitude than anything we’d worked on to date, both in terms of stakes and public danger. Franklin was operating from a distance against individuals with whom he had no relationship, whom he’d never even met. He was not emotionally involved or personally invested with his victims, factors that were usually important clues for us. And he was highly mobile—he could be anywhere.

Though Dave had given me only the bare outlines of the Franklin story, I knew what was on the line for our unit. Because the profiling program was young and still relatively unproven, this could go a few different ways—most of them bad. While I’d been full-time profiling since January, the BSU didn’t have much of a track record within the FBI yet. High-profile cases such as the Atlanta child murders, San Francisco’s Trailside Killer, and the brutal murder of Bronx special ed teacher Francine Elveson would come into our orbit within the next year, but in the fall of 1980, the profiling program was still very much an open-ended experiment in search of validation through a larger proof of concept within the Bureau.

We’d had positive results with the cases we got from local police departments or sheriff’s offices. In addition, there had been a couple of dramatic successes that had gotten the law enforcement community’s attention in the form of what we called 62-D classifications: Domestic Police Cooperation. It meant that even though the FBI didn’t have primary jurisdiction in the case, the Bureau might possess some investigative tool or test that could be helpful to a local police agency. Such requests would be handled through the closest field office and were supposed to be channeled through headquarters. More often, it seemed, the special agent in charge of the field office (we call them SACs, with each letter pronounced, S.A.C., as opposed to assistant special agents in charge, whom we refer to as ASACs, pronounced A-sack) would say something like, Screw headquarters. I want to talk to you. SACs are pretty high up on the Bureau food chain, so they usually got their way. Eventually, each field office would assign a profile coordinator, but that hadn’t happened yet.

In December 1979, I got a call from Special Agent Robert Leary of the Rome, Georgia, resident agency. Resident agencies are smaller FBI installations in areas not large enough for a field office. They generally work in concert with the nearest field office. Several days before, a pretty and outgoing twelve-year-old girl named Mary Frances Stoner, a drum majorette in her school’s marching band, disappeared just after being let off the school bus at the end of her driveway, which led a hundred yards to her home in nearby Adairsville, in the northwest corner of the state. Her body had been found in the woods, about ten miles away and just over the county line, by a young couple who noticed a yellow coat lying on the ground and went over to investigate. When they saw what was underneath the coat, they contacted police, who came immediately and processed the scene. The medical examiner found evidence of sexual assault, manual strangulation from the rear, and blunt force trauma to the head. There was a bloodstained rock near the body that the police took as evidence.

After reviewing the case file, crime scene photographs, and autopsy protocols, and studying the victimology, I thought I had a pretty good idea of what had happened, and why this low-risk victim in a low-risk setting had been the subject of such a horrific offense.

I gave the police my profile of the UNSUB over the phone, which included an age range of mid- to late twenties; blue-collar occupation, perhaps an electrician or plumber; a military record with a dishonorable or medical discharge; average to above average intelligence but high school education at most; previous sexual assaults, though probably not any murders; probably married because he fancied himself to be a stud, but the marriage would be either dysfunctional or have ended in separation or divorce; drove a black or dark blue vehicle (I had observed that orderly, compulsive people tended to drive darker cars); and a cocky, confident attitude. Since he had to have been around the abduction scene long enough to have noticed Mary Frances, I thought the police had probably questioned him as a potential witness.

When I finished my profile, they told me I had described a guy they had questioned and just released, named Darrell Gene Devier, a twenty-four-year-old white male who had also been a strong suspect in the rape of a thirteen-year-old girl, but had never been charged. He’d dropped out of school after eighth grade despite an IQ listed at 100–110. He already was twice married and divorced, and currently living with his first ex-wife. He’d joined the army after the first divorce but went AWOL and was dishonorably discharged after seven months. He drove a three-year-old, well-maintained, black Ford Pinto. He was a tree trimmer and had been interviewed